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Starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams
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If you’ve been in love you won’t want to watch the whole thing crumbling away again, with prettier people. If you’ve never been in love you’ll think its nonsense melodrama, because that’s what love is. The film can’t win. It’s a beautiful, quiet story of love as a drug, the only thing in the world while it lasts and the desperation to recapture when it leaves, depicted by two dedicated, obsessive actors mastering their craft before your teary eyes.
It deals in film cliché, in flashbacks and shameful tear-jerking, but the key here is its attention to real life. The flashbacks are essential to show change in all its jarring, unbelievable reality, creating the sense that these characters have woken up one morning and discovered that they’re no longer the people they fell in love with. Of course, that’s not true, and the time difference between first glances and final bruises makes it clear that this has been a gradual disintegration, all the more painful for being so real. The film’s genius lies in its use of cliché to present a jarring change; one minute Gosling serenades Williams on the city streets, a vibrant oddball with a glint in his eye, the next he’s staring down his receding hairline in a motel mirror, unable to remember the feelings that got him there in the first place. None of it should work in a more jaded age but it does, the shameless endless dragging tears rather than tantrums from a crowd who’d rather be watching Harry Potter again. Love’s real, and it hurts. But there’s beauty in sadness and beauty in loss, and this film manages to capture about a tenth of the real life feelings. It doesn’t sound a lot, but if you’ve been in love, you’ll know.
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